23 August 2011

My name is Dulce and I am an expert guide in helping others chart their own course because I am a psychologist.

My journey started in a working-class suburb of Chicago, a middle child of Mexican immigrant parents. My parents left the beet and lettuce fields of California and Texas to work in the factories of Chicago. A choice made, they later told me, to give their children a better life; a life not filled with calluses and back-breaking work, but a life filled with more opportunities than they could never dream of for themselves.

My mother loves to use dichos; sayings that are common in my family as in many Mexican families; they are manifestations of a family's values, a reflection of familial cultural mores. One of my mother's favorite dichos is: "Cada cabeza es un mundo". This simple idiom literally means that each mind is a world in itself. As a psychologist I am compelled to look closer at this expression. It asks fundamental questions: Who am I? Is a person a product of the environment he/she inhabits? How is a person defined? I looked for answers from a variety of places; books, music, art, social activism, relationships. As an undergraduate, my interest in how social, cultural, biological variables intersected was sparked by Gloria Anzaldúa's book “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza”. In this seminal work on culture and identity, she articulated my experience living in a world of ambiguity. Being a child of immigrants, I occupy a world that is tinted by shades of belonging. I am an American who is not quite an American, a Mexican who is not quite a Mexican—a hybrid.

Being a Chicana lesbian, I occupy a world that is molded by rigid gender and racial identities. I am woman who doesn’t conform to traditional gender or cultural roles. So I created my own world. Mi mundo is filled with people who can quote Derrida while eating tacos de carne quisada , who dance between worlds, cultures, genders; who deny the existence of God but pray to la Virgen . I am a lesbian who was raised by a wild pack of jotos, who enjoys the politics of drag and gender illusion. My world is a place where my compañera and I live sin vergüenza of living a life of multiple identities. I am also a feminist who understands the impact of the dominant culture's influence on personal identity. In order for feminism to survive, it must be a hybrid, a place where we move away from the binary and into a place in which we build bridges between communities/ identities/spiritualties. Feminism must be a place where we live “sin fronteras/be a crossroads”.

Dulce Benavides is Chicago born and bred; Tejana Chicana Washingtonian who will receive her doctorate in Psychology this fall and you can find her at http://flavors.me/dcdulce